I've Never Had a Period But I'm Still a Woman

A trans woman shares her experience grappling with menstruation and motherhood.

By
Jen Richards

Jul 13, 2017

Design by Perri Tomkiewicz

Welcome to BAZAAR.com's first ever Period Month, where for an entire four weeks we'll be publishing stories devoted to your period, delving into what really happens during a woman's cycle.

"That spinal twist was intense for my cramps. Nothing like yoga on your period, you know?"

I nod affirmatively to the woman next to me with a tight smile. "Yeah, totally," I reply.

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We're changing in a crowded locker room. I'm home in North Carolina for Christmas and doing hot yoga, which I love enough to overcome my fear of the bodily scrutiny that fills such spaces. All variety of shapes and sizes are welcome here, but I can't help but compare my body to those of the other women. For the most part I'm pretty typical; maybe a little taller than average, though far from the tallest. Half the women are thinner, half bigger. My C-cup breasts are squeezed tightly by a sports bra, like everyone else's.

The author

Ryan P. Fluger

The differences I note are my broad shoulders and the lack of curves at my waist and hips, even if no one else notices. They're the reminder of a difference I fear isn't covered by the atmosphere of body positivity. "All kinds of women welcome" is a reassuring message, unless your womanhood itself is suspect.

I say little to the woman talking about her cramps because I'm trans, and have never had a period.

My mom had a hysterectomy shortly after my younger brother was born, so I didn't grow up with any menstrual products in the home. Since she thought she was raising two boys, periods just weren't part of our conversations. Today, my roommate and most of my friends are cis women, so it's a frequent part of many discussions. I know which of them get particularly bad PMS and which symptoms they're most prone to. Some are trying to get pregnant, so news about their cycles is shared like gossip. I keep pads in my bathroom and sometimes carry tampons in my purse for when, inevitably, someone needs one.

"I've never wished I had a period, but I would give anything to be able to carry a child. "

It came as a surprise at first, how much women talk about periods. My friends who have only ever known me as Jen often forget that I'm trans and don't share this experience with them, but I had many close girl friends growing up and never heard anything about menstruation. It never occurred to me that they’d somehow learned or collectively decided that it wasn't appropriate conversation when boys were around. Shortly into my transition, I noticed that women started casually chatting with me in the bathroom, or not ending video calls with me when they went to pee. Each of these events felt like a marker in my progress to being accepted as a woman, and if there was a final leg of this particular path, it was period talk. The finish line was being asked if I had a tampon to spare.

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"I wish I had to suffer bloating and cramps every month," my friend Gizelle tells me over ramen. We're in the Castro District of San Francisco for the Frameline Film Festival. Like me, Gizelle is trans. As a makeup artist for MAC, she works with a crew of cis women. She's sympathetic to the pain and discomfort, but says, "That's the body going, 'We didn't get pregnant this time, but let's get ready to try again.'" Gizelle gets quiet and gets a faraway look in her eye, then shrugs it off. "I wish my body could do that."

I've never wished I had a period, but I would give anything to be able to carry a child. Somehow, I never connected the two. Perhaps it's because most of my closest girlfriends are queer, so there are never any pregnancy scares, and adoption is common. Only a few of them have ever wanted to personally carry a child, and even then only "someday." For my crowd, periods are mostly a nuisance, something to be endured, and have little to do with the creation of family. My lack of one is seen as a stroke of luck. It pains me to see many of my trans girlfriends rejected by men solely because they can't carry children, but the normalcy of various queer forms of family lessens the sting for me personally. For the most part, periods remain periods to me, not reminders of my own difference from other women—much less the sign of potential motherhood.

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"There is no singular universal definition of womanhood. We cannot be reduced to vaginas alone, nor periods, nor motherhood."

I've fought hard to be embraced as a woman, but I confess I have no idea what defines one. For many women, it's bodies. Being born with a visible vagina or penis marks many people, correctly, for the rest of their lives. But for others it's a shared history, and it's true that regardless of how I felt inside, I was raised in a world that gave me advantages denied to others simply because I was a white male. But too often throughout history, defining womanhood was less about finding solidarity in a common experience and more about excluding others. "Ain't I a woman?" was a necessary question from Sojourner Truth because of the ways white women sought to define womanhood specifically to exclude black women. To this day, much of what shapes a view of womanhood in glossy magazines is deeply tied to class and race.

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The lesson of contemporary intersectional feminism is this: there is no singular universal definition of womanhood. We cannot be reduced to vaginas alone, nor periods, nor motherhood. If we can't be defined, perhaps it's because we're too powerful to be reduced in any way. Personally, I say I'm a woman because other women do. I'm part of a community, one with ever-shifting shape and value and direction, one that is increasingly seeking to expand and include rather than reduce and exclude.

I say I'm a woman because other women talk about their periods with me. Even when they know I don't have one.

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